By the time the little band of Indians had reached the doctor's cabin, the first wisps of cloud were clinging to Harney. While they were in the house, the blackness gathered and loomed and darkened until the sun was obscured and the western hills lost themselves in rain. The doctor was in the hills. Prue was making the bed in the little bedroom, and little Miss Prue was asleep on a rug in one corner of the larger apartment. The savages stole in with noiseless, moccasined feet behind the stooping woman. Lafond, forgetting in his excitement everything but the lust of killing, stabbed her deeply twice in the broad of the back. She fell forward on the bed without a murmur, and the murderer, seizing the knob of her hair, circled her brow with his knife's edge, and ripped loose the scalp. Then they all glided back into the other room. Three of the savages took from the wood box near the crude fireplace some of the dried kindling with which Jim Buckley had supplied the family, and began to build a little wigwam-shaped pyramid against the side of the wall. Others moved about furtively, prying here and there for possible plunder. They preserved absolute silence, for the superstitious terror of the place was working on them, and they had begun to experience that panic-like tremor which seems to create an invisible clutch ready to seize from behind. Even the encouraging presence of Rain-in-the-Face was not potent enough to prevent this. Out on the plains the personality of the man had loomed large, but here the legend was greater than he. The warriors felt the imminence of the frowning, brooding manitou of Harney; they almost heard the moaned syllables of the Soulless Ones' complaint. Their movements were those of timid mice, advancing a little, hesitating much, ready to flee in panic. Not so Lafond. He strode roughly over to the corner where the child lay. In his mind, with new vividness, burned that old picture of his humiliation. He began to realize, now that the patient repression of his hate was over, how potent it had been. Alfred and Billy Knapp were out of his reach for the present, but here were the others ready to his hand. He seized little Prue by the hair of her head. The child, thus suddenly awakened, screamed violently, shriek upon shriek, as her terror became more fully conscious of the savage and his bloody knife. About the room the warriors paused nervously. Accustomed enough to screams of this sort, they were now dominated by superstition and were thrown off their wonted balance.